[OAK-9728] Oak-Migrate: --copy-orphaned-versions does not work when version storage exists

• Type: Bug
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 1.42.0
• Component/s: upgrade
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Hans-Peter Stoerr
• Created: 18/Mar/22 18:42
• Updated: 18/Mar/22 20:08

Description

I attempted to copy content from an old repository to a new repository with oak-upgrade while using --copy-orphaned-versions . Due to an old bugfix https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OAK-5112 it turns out that this does not actually copy these: when the new repository already contains a version storage, the orphaned versions are not copied: see this line in RepositorySidegrade.  There is a log message "The version storage on destination already exists. Orphaned version histories will be skipped.".

I'm reporting this as a bug since that is not consistent with the documentation.

By the way: the orphaned versions we need copied are orphaned in the sense that there aren't any checked out mix:versionables for them anymore. But they are actually strongly referenced through a property of type  javax.jcr.PropertyType.REFERENCE. So, not copying these version histories does actually lead to an inconsistent JCR repository. Thus, there is a good case to be made that these should be copied even in the absence of --copy-orphaned-versions. So, one way to solve is to just document this behaviour, but fix the problem that versions referenced through other means than existing versionables would also be copied. (In a way that'd even help us, since that'd copy only what's actually used.)